<em>Game of Thrones</em> Ditches the Book
Every week for the third season of HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones, our roundtable of Ross Douthat (columnist, The New York Times), Spencer Kornhaber (entertainment editor, TheAtlantic.com), and Christopher Orr (senior editor and film critic, The Atlantic) will discuss the latest happenings in Westeros.
Kornhaber: If last week's duel-, death-, and devirginization-packed episode showed Thrones at its most hectic, last night's installment offered a rare chance for viewers to catch their breath. Having summited the treacherous surface of the season's first half, we can now make like Jon and Ygritte and look back at where we came from, look ahead to where we're going, and swap spit like furs-swaddled teenagers.
Scratch that last part, and apologies. My social IQ's out of whack after an hour of watching odd couples couple oddly: Sam and Gilly camping, Jon and Ygritte scaling, Osha and Meera bickering, Theon and his captor "playing," Jaime and Brienne dining, Olenna and Tywin negotiating, and Westeros' many newly bethrothed—Tyrion, Sansa, Cersei, Loras, and Edmure—squirming as if having their fingers flayed. Each union came from unhappy circumstances, but the episode's intrigue came from how these pairs adapted: a truce on the road with Bran, a greater-good rationalization in Riverrun, a furtive alliance at the foot of the Wall.
I found it all to be pretty damn righteous—even though, as mentioned up top, "The Climb" advanced the overall plot only an inch or two. The sole purpose of that opening campfire, for example, was to remind usto Tyrion asking whether his life's in danger proves again that Lena Headey's among the show's greatest assets. Sometimes it's by punctuating with physical comedy (Brienne forking Jaime's roast) and well-constructed quipping ("I don't care what people believe and neither do you" / "As an authority on myself I must disagree"). And when they do deliver action, they : Anyone else feel as vertiginous as Jon Snow during those climbing scenes?
