Was <em>Game of Thrones</em>' Crazy, Bloody Showdown ... Underwhelming?
Orr: The scene! The scene!
Sorry to get all Tattoo-from-Fantasy-Island on you, but it's been a long season of trying not to give away what was going to happen tonight to non-novel-readers such as you, Spencer. Did my various attempts at obfuscation—pretending that the Big Reveal would be that Cersei's a dude, etc.—succeed in maintaining your innocence?
The Red Wedding is one of the best scenes—arguably the best scene—in the George R. R. Martin novels, and anticipation for this brutal payoff has been building since before the season began: when showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss suggested that the success of the season could hinge on their pulling off (wink, wink) one particular scene; when it was revealed that the title of Episode Nine (customarily the dramatic climax of each Game of Thrones season) would be “The Rains of Castamere,” etc.
In that context—i.e., expecting that my world would be utterly rocked by this episode—I confess that I feel, for the moment at least, slightly underwhelmed. The scene was bloody and shocking and certainly set a principal-character-body-count record for the show, but I couldn't help but feel that it lacked the physical scale of the last penultimate episode (“Blackwater”) and the moral scale of the one before that (“Baelor”).
None of which is to suggest it wasn't an extremely striking bit of television—my favorite moment was when Catelyn noticed that Roose Bolton was rocked when poor Ned Stark was parted from his head in Season One. Not having read the books at that point, I was completely stunned in a way that (obviously) wasn't really possible this time around.
