Game of Thrones [TV] Master Thread

[lebrick]

Yes, this is implied. Also, that's why the episode was called Two Swords.

LMAO!!!

[-Hyperion-]

Lol,, maybe.. I thought it was due to the melting of Robb starks sword and made into 2 swords...

It was Ned's...

I felt like punching a wall first time I read what they did to Ice....

[bojangles1987]

I liked the style of clothing that the Dornishmen wore, it makes them look unique. Oberyn was badass but was he such a raging **** in the books?

Basically, it's implied he ****s everything that walks.

[Cuauhtémoc1520]

I really liked the first episode. You knew they weren't going to lead you right into the meat of everything and needed to set things up for future episodes.

What I love about this show is how well they can juggle 10 different story lines. When you think you have seen everything, another story you forgot about pops up.

I can't wait for episode 2. Also, how about that red head in the brothel? Damn what an ass on that white girl.

[Drunken Cat]

The first episode had way too much soap opera content for me (The Young and the Restless of Kings Landing). However, there were plenty of redeeming qualities. Arya and the Hound especially.

[Trigger unhappy]

I read the books and have only about 100pages left in the last one that has been released..

Oberyn, known as the red viper,, they changed his intro from the books...everything was just like the books but when Tyrian and company greet them, they actually meet the red viper then, and Tyrion and him share a carriage and have that conversation they had later in the show..I don't remember him being gay.. He has a lot of bastard daughters they call the sand snakes, and he has his paramour chick,,, but I don't remember the whorehouse and gayness at all... Maybe I'm wrong

The books did mention that he went both ways.

[DARKSEID]

I don't like to complain about anything, but since everyone's doing it... do we really need the **** scenes?

I mean.. what purpose do they serve except grossing you out.

[DARKSEID]

Basically, it's implied he ****s everything that walks.

oh ok I get it

[ИATAS]

It was Ned's...

I felt like punching a wall first time I read what they did to Ice....

Yep.

Also Arya got her sword back, needle. So while it was symbolic of Lannister to melt Ned's sword and throwing the wolf into the fire as to say this is the end of the Starks and our troubles, it was equally as symbolic that the young wolf in Arya got hers back.

[Ragnar Lothbrok]

Best Recapper of Game of Thones Episode is Grantland's Andy Greenwald. His recap of ep 1:

Poor Ned Stark. Just when we thought he could suffer no greater posthumous indignity — when last we saw his bones, they were stashed in a box that’s presumably going to linger forever in the depths of Walder Frey’s nefarious coat check — Season 4 of Game of Thrones begins with the sight of the last Lord of Winterfell’s mighty broadsword being smelted in a raging fire. It was a canny way for Maesters Benioff and Weiss to begin another year in Westeros: with an image that served as both its own grisly recap of where we’ve been and a tease as to where we might be headed. It also was a definitive reminder of where we are now: marooned in a realm that is utterly under the thumb of the Hand of the King.

Tywin Lannister is the steel that girds the Iron Throne. Importing a blacksmith may have been necessary to split Ned’s sword in two, but the radical thinking behind it was all Tywin’s. This is a changed world; the old gods still hold sway, but new methods are now required to hold on to power. Ever since Bran Stark dropped like a dead raven out of a tower window, those who remained attached to outmoded concepts like “honor,” “loyalty,” and “revenge” have lost — some figuratively, others their lives. The current winners in the titular Game of Thrones are those who are willing to play fast and loose with the rules. So far, this has meant good things for Tywin, a man who uses his children as bargaining chips and orders wholesale slaughter with the stroke of a pen. It takes a flexible mind like his to consider the fearsome symbology of a giant Valyrian sword and realize that two sharper blades are a lot better than a single, clunky one. Maybe not at representing anything, but definitely in terms of killing. Which, when you think about it, is really all that ought to be required of a sword.

Yet why did Tywin’s victory lap in the opening moments of “Two Swords” feel so much like the end of something? Perhaps it was because, after an entire season of watching him wreak havoc by longhand, someone finally insisted on a rewrite. Jaime Lannister’s time in captivity changed him mightily. (As he says to Brienne, since returning, “every Lannister I’ve seen has been a pain in my arse.”) By refusing his father’s demand to become his rightful heir, Jaime drove his blade right into the heart of Tywin’s one vulnerability: time. As this season begins, Tywin is the most powerful man in Westeros, but he’s just one man. And, thanks to HBO’s current advertising blitz, we all know what happens to them. Tywin can move the chess pieces to the perfect spots, but he can’t control them once they’re there. And the next generation of threats — dragons to the east, wildlings and White Walkers to the north and, right under his nose, imps and little girls — all have plans of their own. “The war is over. The king is safe,” Tywin intones in the voice of someone unfamiliar with the legal teachings of House Murphy. “The king is never safe,” Jaime replies. He should know: He’s already killed one himself.

One way to regard Tywin Lannister is with fear. Another way is with patience. He’s an old man with a lunatic grandson on the throne, an alcoholic depressive daughter upstairs, and two sons: the one he disdains and the one he just disowned. The future of Westeros can’t be written. At least not from behind a desk.

***9830;***9830;***9830;

Tywin-GOT-HP

Just as Tywin can’t control what’s coming, neither can we anticipate it. It’s foolish to make predictions at the start of a new season of Game of Thrones, other than “really terrible things will happen.” (Of course, this doesn’t apply if you’ve read the George R.R. Martin books upon which the series is based — and get ready for nine more weeks of me reminding you that I haven’t.) Still, I can’t shake the feeling this will be the year when the old Game board is finally tossed aside completely, revealing an even more chaotic and fearsome competition in its stead. The deaths of Robb and Cat Stark eliminated the last of the dreamers. Those remaining are either hardened realists like Tywin and the Hound, scarred survivors like Jon Snow and his half-sisters, Arya and Sansa, flexible outcasts like Tyrion and Shae, or those representing something completely new, like vision-questing Bran (who was MIA this episode) and saber-rattling Daenerys. (I suppose you could also add one more category: those who look completely new, like Daario Naharis, who ended last season looking like this and now has morphed into the junkie busker from Treme.) I’m hoping this will be the year the corners of Thrones’s ever-expanding map finally begin to fold in on themselves, allowing for collisions, connections, and the settling of scores that have been years in the making.

But as I wrote last week, I’m not going to spend these first hours of Season 4 mentally fast-forwarding. Just as there’s a wrong way to play the Game of Thrones, there’s certainly a wrong way to watch it. The show’s many pleasures tend to culminate in jaw-dropping moments like the Red Wedding, but they surely aren’t limited to them. Some may find the disjointed, expository nature of a Thrones premiere exhausting or at least inferior to whatever bloodbath it inevitably leads to. But I actually prefer this quieter, throat-clearing version of the show. There’s a fun “getting the band back together” feel to hours like “Two Swords.” They provide a chance to both see and feel the great sweep of the show’s canvas: Here is Ygritte, licking her emotional wounds by licking her arrows, and here is Jon Snow telling his elders exactly how much he’s learned to go on top of the “nothing” he once knew. These episodes offer room for the small character beats that might not make it out of the editing suite later in the season, like the delightful wit and wisdom of Bronn (“I’d probably go to sleep but I’m getting old”), the budding bromance between Daario and Grey Worm, or Lady Olenna gawping at the sight of Brienne as if she were the world’s tallest lemon cake.

But hours like these are also the best showcases for the real skill required to adapt and run a series like Game of Thrones — which is to say “Game of Thrones,” because there’s never been a series quite like this, certainly not in ambition or in execution. Take, for example, the introduction of Prince Oberyn Martell, an alluring, pansexual libertine with revenge on his mind. (Thanks to Pedro Pascal’s wriggly performance, Oberyn reminded me of Inigo Montoya, had he hailed from Sodom instead of Spain.) The expository chatting at Littlefinger’s brothel — ****ed with a little bit of stabbing — gobbled up more than eight minutes of screen time, which is more than twice as long as a standard TV scene. It flowed from pure sexposition, in which the baring of acrobatic limbs helped establish Oberyn and his “paramour” Ellaria Sand (the terrific Indira Varma) as truth-telling kink merchants, into a second sub-scene in which Oberyn was given the chance to prove both his anti-Lannister bona fides and his effectiveness with the sharper of the two weapons he keeps near his waist. From there, the action moved outside, to allow Oberyn one more chance to Dornesplain his beef — or should that be mutton? — directly to a crisis-managing Tyrion. Oberyn hates everyone who ever crawled out from beneath Casterly Rock, you see. And even though he’s in town thanks to Lannister largesse, that’s not going to stop him from trying to murder as many of them as possible.

Dorne-GOT-HP

The first time I watched the episode, I was enthralled by the way the scene unfolded: the mix of performative swagger and slow-building menace, the way Oberyn and Ellaria had no time for the subtext — to them, one kind of poking is as good as another. When I watched it a second time, I could suddenly see the seams. I was amazed how declarative it all was, Pascal reading pages of explanatory text that, in the wrong hands, could come off as clunky as a book report. But instead it soared as nimbly as Dany’s dragons. Pitch-perfect performances aside, how is such a thing possible?