Spoilers for this episode of Game of Thrones follow, obviously.
Finally.
This is the episode we've all been waiting for, the great karmic reckoning for the countless sins of Joffrey Baratheon. Despite all the horrible things we've seen on this show, it doesn't have as many true villains as you'd expect. Consider Jaime, a man who once tossed a 10-year-old child off a tower because he wanted to keep having sex with his sister, who has somehow transformed into a fan-favorite hero. Or Theon, the ward who betrayed Winterfell and put its people to the sword, and yet became easily the most pitiable character in the series. People might do terrible things in Game of Thrones but they usually have dimensions, reasons, and tragedies of their own behind it.
But Joffrey? Joffrey was always pure, irredeemable evil; the question always seemed to be not whether he would die, but when, how, and by whose hand. In the latest episode “The Lion and the Rose,” which was scripted by George R. R. Martin himself, we get the answer to at least one of those questions: Today was a very good day for Joffrey to die.
Want to know how the episode compares to the books? We've got a point-by-point breakdown:
Theon
Back at the living hell that is the Dreadfort, Ramsay Snow merrily hunts a terrified girl named Tansy through the woods with the help of his hounds—and a female companion named Myranda (the would-be nun who seduced Theon before his castration last season) who seems just as excited about this murder game as her psychotic paramour. After Myranda shoots an arrow through the girl's leg, Ramsay feeds her to the dogs while a traumatized Theon (who now serves Ramsay under the name “Reek”) shudders.
Roose Bolton returns to the Dreadfort with a new wife in tow: Walda Frey, whom he doubtless married to cement his alliance with House Frey, as Robb so fatally failed to do. He asks to see Theon and isn't pleased to learn that his bastard son has physically and psychologically destroyed a valuable hostage, especially while Balon Greyjoy's men still threaten his hold on the North. But Ramsay produces a very useful piece of information from Theon: Bran and Rickon Stark still live, and are likely heading north. Roose tells Locke (the man who cut off Jaime's hand) to go hunting for the Stark boys and sends Ramsay to prove himself by taking the strategically important Moat Cailin from the Ironborn with Theon.
Also, is every scene with the castrated Theon going to end by cutting away to a shot of sausages from now on? I'm not complaining, just asking.
In the books: Here we jump ahead to the fifth book in the series, A Dance for Dragons, where we encounter Theon for the first time since Ramsay's men captured him at Winterfell—although he is initially introduced in the chapter only as Reek. We're told the torture seems to have aged him almost 40 years and whitened his hair, so TV Theon is actually looking pretty good in comparison. Ramsay indeed makes a habit of hunting girls for sport, “rewarding” those who give him the most amusement by raping them, killing them quickly, and naming a dog after them; those who fail to amuse him get flayed alive before death. He had no female companion like Myranda for his cruelties, however.
Although Ramsay does set out to take Moat Cailin with Theon, he doesn't meet up with his father and his new wife Walda Frey until later. (We're told Roose chose the heavy-set Walda from among the Frey girls because Lord Walder Frey agreed to pay the weight of any bride in silver.) Though Roose criticizes Ramsay for some of his other... excesses at that time, he doesn't specifically rebuke him for destroying Theon. As for Locke, who is known in the books as Vargo Hoat, he never returns to the Dreadfort; when the Mountain takes Harrenhal for the Lannisters he slowly dismembers Vargo and feeds his own flesh back to him in revenge for Jaime's maiming.
The Brothers Lannister
Jaime continues to struggle with the loss of his hand, spilling wine as he eats with Tyrion. And his problems are bigger than just holding goblets: he doesn't know how to fight with his left hand, and it's only a matter of time before people realize he's helpless. Tyrion empathizes; he's a maimed dwarf with a lifetime of experience in being mocked, despised and pitied, after all. He advises Jaime to do what he has done: forget about physical prowess and focus on other skills instead, like commanding. Though different in delivery, it's similar advice in content to the advice Tywin gave his son, and Jaime is similarly unmoved. Since he's afraid of being discovered if he tries to retrain his left hand, Tyrion recommends a discreet swordsman to kick his ass in private: Bronn.
Tyrion also presents a wedding gift to his terrible nephew, a venerated book called The Lives of Four Kings. Though he pretends to accept it graciously, that's obviously a fakeout; he soon chops it into pieces with the gift he gets from Tywin, the other Valyrian sword forged from Ned's broadsword, which he names Widow's Wail. Varys also informs Tyrion that thanks to Shae's tantrum last week, word about her has gotten back to Cersei, and he can't (or won't) lie about it if she asks. Sure enough, Cersei points Shae out to Lord Tywin—who promised to hang Tyrion's next prostitute—and he orders her brought to the Tower of the Hand before the wedding. Since Shae refuses to acknowledge the danger, Tyrion finally chooses the nuclear option and ends things ugly: he tells her she's just a unworthy whore to him, and has Bronn drag her off to a ship bound for Pentos while she cries. There's a scene in the first book where Arya has to send away her direwolf, Nymeria, so that the Lannisters won't kill her for biting Joffrey; she throws rocks at her until she finally leaves, because it's the only way to save her. It feels a lot like this. Peter Dinklage is amazing here, spitting out every horrible word like a punch to his own gut.
In the books: Instead of Bronn, Jaime practiced left-handed swordfighting with childhood friend Ser Addam Marbrand—and later, Ser Ilyn Payne, whose tongue was removed by the Mad King and thus can tell no tales of Jaime's failings. Although Varys warns Tyrion that he won't lie about Shae if asked, we see no indication that Cersei has discovered her. Indeed, in the previous book A Clash for Kings Cersei tried to learn the identity of Tyrion's prostitute and mistakenly believed it to be another woman, Alayaya. Though Tyrion worries for Shae and ultimately decides to marry her off to a knight named Ser Tallad to keep her safe, he never rejects her and she knows nothing about his plans before the wedding.
Dragonstone
As Melisandre continues her conversion of Dragonstone to the Red God, it's time for some good old-fashioned burnings at the stake. Three men go to the flames for refusing to accept the Lord of Light, including Lady Selyse's brother—and thanks to her R'hllor fanaticism she is super psyched about it. There's an awkward dinner afterwards involving Melisandre, Stannis and Selyse where Selyse tries to recall fond memories with her husband and he shuts her the hell down in front of his mistress. Selyse talks about how their “sinful” daughter Shireen needs to be beaten, which Stannis shuts down even harder. They send Melisandre to proselytize to the princess instead, wherein the Red Lady tries to compare the screams of the burned men to the screams of women giving birth, whom afterwards are filled with joy. “Afterwards they aren't ash and bone,” responds the girl. Point: Shireen. Melisandre says the seven gods of the septons are a lie and there are only two gods: a lord of light and a lord of darkness who are eternally at war. Sounds an awful lot like Christianity, no? Especially when you factor in the Inquisition-like burnings. And even more so when she explains the truth about hell: “There is only one hell, princess. The one we live in now.”
In the books: Although Selyse and Melisandre burn a number of people, including Selyse's brother, it doesn't happen quite like this. After Melisandre burns down the sept (the church of the Faith of the Seven) on Dragonstone, a lord named Guncer Glass withdraws his support for Stannis and is burned by Selyse while Stannis is fighting the Battle of the Blackwater. Selyse's brother Alester Florent serves as the Hand for Stannis and uses his position to try and make peace with the Lannisters; he is imprisoned and later burned for it. We never see Melisandre and Shireen speak, perhaps in part because neither have their own chapters in Storm of Swords.
Bran
A hungry Bran goes skinshifting into his direwolf Summer and feeds on a deer, until Jojen and Meera wake him. They say he's been gone for hours and while they understand it's awesome to be able to run as a wolf, if he stays too long in Summer he'll forget his humanity and never return. They encounter a strange tree with a face in it, and when he touches it he sees a series of images: a three-eyed crow, his father, the Iron Throne room covered in falling snow, the face of a White Walker reflected in ice, himself falling from the tower at Winterfell, and most ominously, what appears to be the shadow of a dragon over Kings Landing. A voice says “north,” but then after Bran awakens and says “I know where we have to go."
In the books: We seem to be jumping ahead to A Dance with Dragons here as well, skipping at least some of Bran's journey north of the Wall. He does feed from behind the eyes of his wolf when hungry, though on the flesh of dead Night's Watch men rather than animals. Instead of touching a tree, Bran eats a weirwood paste that inspires a series of visions through the heart tree of Winterfell. All those visions seem to take place throughout the history of Winterfell, however, rather all of Westeros; there is no image of a dragon or Kings Landing.
The Purple Wedding
After a sumptuous wedding attended by all the usual suspects (including Elliara Sand, whose dress has amazing shoulderpads that look like the '80s by way of Mars), Tywin complains about the expense to Lady Olenna. It's a scene that's basically an excuse for them to banter some more, which I approve of since they have somehow become the OTP [Ed.—One True Pairing] of this show for me. Olenna also straight-up tells Mace Tyrell to shoo because the grownups are talking, emphasizing yet again who the true power behind the Tyrells is. She also pauses briefly to admire Sansa, with her pretty hair and pretty necklace, and offers condolences for the Red Wedding.
After Margaery announces that they're donating the leftovers from the feast to the poor, Cersei orders Pycelle to have the food fed to the dogs instead because she is no longer queen and feeling rather petty about it. The Red Viper helpfully shows up to needle the former Queen Regent about her fading power, bring up his sister's murder for the millionth time, and suggests that her daughter Myrcella is lucky to be in Dorne where they are less fond of killing of children. Ooooh. The Viper and his lady also make eyes at Loras, possibly foreshadowing a future threesome; that causes the knight to stumble into Jaime, who casually informs him that if he marries Cersei she'll kill him in his sleep. It's a dangerous wedding feast, and it's just getting started.
Brienne offers her congratulations to the royal couple, and is greeted graciously by her once-and-current queen Margaery, and indifferently by Joffrey. As she leaves, Cersei thanks her for saving Jaime, and the too-honest Brienne unwisely says that Jaime saved her as well. That's a story about Jaime that Cersei hasn't heard, and Cersei doesn't like women with stories about Jaime that she hasn't heard. Not to mention a woman like Brienne, who has all the physical prowess and power that Cersei always felt denied because of her gender. Her voice gets dangerous and she asks whether Brienne loves Jaime, which Brienne effectively answers with a dust cloud.
Since it wouldn't be Joffrey's wedding if things didn't get terrible, he soon summons a troupe of little people for a comical reenactment of the War of Five Kings that is clearly designed to humiliate Tyrion. It also functions as a quick summary of all the worst things that have happened in Game of Thrones so far, and thus manages to upset several other people as well, particularly Loras and Sansa when it mocks the deaths of Renly and Robb. As Sansa and Tyrion sit at the lonely end of the table like Team I Hate My Life, Joffrey invites Tyrion to join the other dwarves, which Tyrion declines with an incredibly unwise shot at Joffrey's masculinity. Joffrey empties his goblet of wine over Tyrion's head in response, and orders Tyrion to serve as his cupbearer, throwing his cup and demanding that Tyrion kneel. Margaery manages to distract him by announcing that the pie has arrived.
He cuts the pie with his new sword and Margaery coos that he's her hero; you get the feeling that the rest of her life is going to be a long series of attempts to divert his sadism with some version of “look, the pie!” Although Tyrion tries to slip away with Sansa, Joffrey soon calls him back demanding more wine to wash it down. After he drinks, he starts coughing and suddenly he's choking. Jaime and Cersei run to his side, but there's nothing to be done. The Monster of Kings Landing dies, fast and ugly, in the arms of both of his real parents, one finger extended to point at Tyrion—who happens to be holding the poisoned goblet that killed him. Cersei screams for the guards to arrest Tyrion for the murder of the King, and boy is he screwed.
In the books: The wedding and feast are very similar to the books, though Jaime doesn't return to King's Landing with Brienne until after the wedding, so neither of them are present. A few other details are different: The wedding chalice that Mace Tyrell gives Joffrey is actually three feet tall and not much smaller than Tyrion himself. Margaery never plans to donate the feed to the poor, and Joffrey doesn't throw coins at any bards, though we're told that “The Rains of Castamere” is performed numerous times. There's also no banter between Tywin and Olemma, and instead of Joffrey, the pie is cut by Ned-beheader Ilyn Payne. Rather than the larger performance of the War of Five Kings, there are only two dwarf jousters, representing the Starks and the Baratheons, who enter riding a pig and a dog. (If you want to know who really poisoned Joffrey, then look closely—the show's given you all the clues you need. Or you can click right here at your own risk.)
Game of Thrones is a story about violence.
Specifically, it is a story about about how violence and oppression are both viral and hereditary; how those infected by it replicate it, and how it is handed down generation to generation as surely as crowns and lands and titles. If you really want to understand the death of Joffrey Baratheon—who killed him, how, and why—you have to understand the history of violence that preceded it.
As monstrous as he was, Joffrey didn't happen in a vacuum. Rather, he was a link in a much larger chain of anger and blood that stretched back long before the War of Five Kings to Robert's Rebellion, and earlier still.
Much like the War of Five Kings, the Rebellion started with a king who made a fatal error involving the Starks. After Ned's sister Lyanna was taken by the Targaryen heir Rhaegar, his father and brother sought justice from King Aerys II—but were brutally executed by him instead. That forced Ned and Robert (who was betrothed to Lyanna) to go to war, leading to the fall of the Targaryens, the exodus of Daenerys, and the deaths not only of Rhaegar, but his wife Elia and two children, at the hands of Lannister soldiers. The rebellion put Robert on the throne, and with Lyanna dead it put Cersei on the throne beside him—and Joffrey after him.
Each act of violence was provoked by violence, and each provoked more violence still. A generation later, the consequences of Robert's Rebellion still directly inform everything that happens, not only in obvious forms like the vengeful Red Viper, but more subtle ones like Cersei. The great schism of her marriage to Robert was not just her secret relationship with Jaime but his inability to forget Lyanna—the feeling of living powerlessly in the shadow of a dead woman. While this might seem like a less dangerous consequence of Robert's Rebellion than a vicious warrior like Oberyn Martell coming to claim vengeance, Cersei's jealousy and frustration becomes a far more destructive force for the Seven Kingdoms.
Resentment has always been the defining emotion of Cersei's life. She believes that she was unjustly denied the love, power and respect she believes she deserved—not just because of Lyanna, but because she was born a woman. She's always seen her twin, Jaime, as the alternate universe version of herself, the person she might have been if she had been born a man. While she got traded like chattel to someone she didn't love, Jaime became a hero of tournaments and battlefields, powerful and feared.
And she has a point. It sucks that she got undermined and deprived of opportunities at every turn in ways that Jaime wasn't. But let's also be real: If Cersei really had been a man, she might've been a ruthless fighter, but she also would have been a terrible leader in every possible way. We see it in her total mismanagement as Queen Regent, and we see it even more clearly in Joffrey. Just like so much of the violence we see in the Seven Kingdoms, Cersei decides to take all her frustration and pain and pay it forward. And since she's not a warrior, she does it the only way she knows how: by teaching her son to be all of the things she couldn't be.
Cersei has always been a broken hammer that saw everyone around her as a nail, and she resents the fact that she didn't get to spend her life pounding them down. And so she raises a son who sees it as his god-given right to do exactly that. Where she felt her will subordinated at every turn by men, she teaches Joffrey to see his will done at every turn, no matter what the consequences.
This is the great irony of Cersei: that while she spent her life chafing under the limitations of a sexist culture, rather than shaping Joffrey into the type of man who might grant a woman power, she turns him into a man who delights in abusing women. She sees herself in him, rather than the women he tortures, the way she has always seen herself in Jaime—because they are the ones with the power.
“Someday you'll sit the throne and the truth will be what you make it,” Cersei tells her son after he is bested by Arya and bitten by her wolf, insisting that in the story everyone else hears, Joffrey will be the hero. “You are my darling boy, and the world will be exactly as you want it to be.”
In the books, Tywin describes Joffrey as Robert the Second after a particularly frustrating interaction with the young king, but Tyrion calls him something worse: Aerys the Third, a spiritual successor not to his inept “father” but to the Mad King whose cruelty inspired Robert's Rebellion and ended the Targaryen dynasty after more than a thousand years. It's an apt comparison.
Joffrey sees power the way Cersei taught him to see it: like a gun that never stops firing, a zero-sum game you lose the moment you fail to show force. It's the same thing Cersei said to Littlefinger long ago when she had a soldier hold a knife to his throat: “Power is power.” And it is, until it isn't. Joffrey's sense of entitlement is so complete that any impediments to his will, no matter how small, seem like an intolerable injustice that must be greeted with instant, blinding violence. The beheading of Ned Stark was as devastating as it was pointless, an impetuous cruelty that nearly cost him his crown. But this has always been the fatal flaw of Joffrey: not simply that he is evil and cruel, but that he is evil and cruel to the wrong people, and without regard for the consequences.
Indeed, a great many of Joffrey's horrific acts might have gone unpunished if only he'd learned how to indulge them more carefully. That's the difference too between Roose Bolton, a man who flayed his enemies but still managed to ally with the nobler-than-thou Starks, and his bastard Ramsay, who places no strategic limits on his sadism. That's why Roose criticizes Ramsay—not for his crimes but for his lack of context or subtlety, and what that failing could cost them.
Here's the final irony of Cersei: She killed her son. Regardless of who poisoned the wine, she's a huge part of what made them slip it in the cup. If she'd raised him to be a different kind of king—or at least, more careful about his worst impulses—he might very well have lived through his wedding. Instead, she turned him into an obvious, ugly liability, making his death attractive not only to his enemies but many of his “allies” as well. Who had the motivation to kill Joffrey? Pretty much everyone, including anyone who didn't want the Lannisters' hold on the crown to end the same way it did for the Targaryens.
In the books, Arya says that when she learns about Joffrey's death she feels nothing. She might have named him every night on her death list, but now that she's finally able to cross him off she realizes that it doesn't bring back Ned, or Catelyn, or Robb. She's busy committing murders of her own right now as well, an arc of violence set entirely in motion by Joffrey's own acts of cruelty. His death now can do nothing to stop it, or her, as she wanders the Riverlands with the Hound, both of them paying the pain forward over and over—like Robert, like Cersei, like Joffrey—whether they know it or not.
