Ramblings Concerning Nothing

Game of Thrones S2 Preview

(Note: S1 is fair game - nothing major in S2 will be given away, until a special spoiler section at the very end.)

Being a showrunner is a really hard job. Doing it takes months of 18-hour days and years of preparation, and even then, that says nothing about doing the job well. For Game of Thrones, Benioff and Weiss have had the benefit of having an immediate roadmap and plot laid out, as well as a bunch of dialogue and character motivations spelled out for them. But they also know they have very little control - Ned has to die at the end of S1, no matter what, no matter what viewers (or they) think. They need to establish and flesh out dozens of characters, which is much simpler in a novel than it is on a weekly television show. In particular, the novels have a lot of narration and peeks into characters’ heads, and there’s no way to really do that in TV other than clunky speeches. 

So when I say I think they did an excellent job adapting the first book of the series, I know how difficult of a job that is. And when I look forward to S2 (having read the book it’s based on), I see how much of a different challenge that is, and how it promises to cloud any discussion we wish to have about the series. 

I just watched all of S1 in Blu-ray in about 12 hours, and I want to talk through it - what went well, what didn’t go well. I’ll also talk about some of the characters we’ll see, and what things a sharp viewer should be looking for. But more importantly, I hope to raise some questions that will inform how we talk about S2, and what the show really is about. Random thoughts, in bullet points, after the jump.

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Game of Thrones - “Fire and Blood”

“Fire and Blood” may be the most HBO episode HBO has ever had. When I first watched it Sunday evening, I thought it was a victim of following the novel very closely, giving us a traditional denouement over the usual craziness that surrounds a season finale. A few days later I realized that “Baelor” was really the season finale - it ended on two cliffhangers and a huge battle, and that “Fire and Blood” was a backdoor S2 premiere.

Now I think it’s both of those and a message to HBO viewers. My brother, after learning Ned was really, really dead, said, “But who’s going to watch now?” That’s probably the question HBO asked too, so they decided to give the audience exactly what the book does - a bunch of characters moving into different chapters in their lives. While it may seem like the episode followed the book’s structure or wanted to set up S2 well, the real way to hook some viewers would be to put a bunch of violence and nudity in. Instead, they made an episode that doesn’t look like a season finale - there are no real cliffhangers other than the entire plot. The only characters who get closure are the dead ones. These are the episodes HBO loves - ones that serve the grand storyline in the sky.

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Game of Thrones - “You Win or You Die”

It’s funny that this week’s episode was viewable directly after last week’s “A Golden Crown” on HBO’s new Go service, because the two correlate so closely thematically. There was a direct mention to the Game, and almost everything in the episode dealt with who leads and what makes a good leader. Again, it was difficult to watch Ned take the right path, knowing he would end up walking into such a terrible trap.

Since I don’t want to repeat myself, let’s talk about how great an episode this was and how the next three episodes promise to be the best yet.

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Game of Thrones - “A Golden Crown”

We’re now past the midway point of Game of Thrones’s first season, and it’s pretty clear that the show, much like the book, is focusing on the titular game for thematic material. What power means and does is a central concern, as is the political machinations that put people in power. What’s also clear is that within Westeros, if you’re promised anything as a child, don’t count on getting it.

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Game of Thrones - “The Wolf and the Lion”

According to my The One Ring bookmark, I am on page 317 of A Game of Thrones. If you don’t know, the book is presented in third person limited, and the character focus switches from chapter to chapter. Still, there are a main set of characters that we get to know personally, and the others can only come through via a third party or whispers.

Filling in these gaps with the other characters that the structure of the novel doesn’t allow will be one of the show’s greatest triumphs, but thus far we haven’t seen too much of it. The first four episodes were pretty strict with sticking to book events and dialogue, distributing scenes equally, but “The Wolf and the Lion” blew the doors off, using a bunch of new scenes and sticking with King’s Landing and The Eyrie to create a complete package - by far the show’s best episode to date.

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Game of Thrones - “Lord Snow”

The first thing I thought watching “Lord Snow” was that this episode has to look better in retrospect.

Like a lot of HBO shows, Game of Thrones seems decided that it’s a slow burn show. This is probably a good idea, as it has a huge world to introduce and plenty of interesting characters to focus on. But this episode had even less narrative momentum than the pilot, and it risks giving up the burn and simply becoming slow.

Part of this is the difficulty in the transition from book to television. In a book, you don’t expect some big plot point every 55 pages. But a lot of viewers will expect a big action setpiece or a big reveal every 55 minutes, and I’m glad the show isn’t trying to force anything that’s not there. 

Which is why I hope after the first season, or after the series, we can look back on this episode and get a lot more out of it, after understanding all of the backstory and character motivations. We just go too fast, from location to character to location, without time to really dig in on any one person or place. Focusing on one character or location and giving the others less for that week would help the show a lot. There’s a look Robert gives Jaime at the end of their speech, and I just thought, “I hope I eventually understand what that means.”

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Game of Thrones - “The Highroad”

I enjoyed the first season of Boardwalk Empire a lot. I think it was interesting, mostly, but I never thought it understood what it was doing episode-to-episode. It seemed like Terence Winter & Co. just got to a point in the story and ended on a lingering wide shot of a character staring at something.

And I’m frightened Game of Thrones will do the same thing. This is much harder than what Boardwalk Empire has to deal with, because while BE is based on true events, you can pretty much make up what you want. You can add entire story arcs and characters to say what you’re trying to. If Benioff and Weiss did that here, they would be executed by Ned himself.

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