The Screaming Viking

Caught episode 4 of thrones last night and as per the HBO original series formula it is hitting it’s stride.  Over the last 3 episodes though I have noticed that they get a little slow around the 20min mark.  It seems like each one I’ve contemplated turning off at that point and going to bed.  maybe it’s a function of me watching them a little later in the evening than I’d like or maybe they are dragging a bit at that point…either way if I push through that little dull spot it seems like they pick up quite nicely.

I like how they are starting to show some of the abuse of Dany and how they are showing her stand up for herself, “Next time you raise a hand to me you won’t have hands to raise” was a pretty classic line, and her whoopin up on him a little was good too.  It still lacks a bit of foundation, but by this time I’m sure the viewer is drawn in to it and gets the idea.  What I don’t get is how Drogo is going to see the bruise on her face and not go nuts.  It’s not like this is any regular woman in the tribe, this is their queen and he’s going to allow someone to hit her?  Maybe they will play off of that a little bit and the crowning will work itself out….we’ll see I guess.  I will say though I am interested in seeing how this plays out.  I’d like to see Drogo take a little more prominent role, so far he’s been just some guy and everyone talks about how tuff he is.  The end isn’t going to mean a whole lot if he doesn’t become more prominent.  I pictured their party to be bigger as well, but I guess you can’t reasonably show 40k people.

There was some good action at the wall this episode.  Jon is showing how he’s becoming a leader and we finally got some interaction with a wolf!  They have been far too absent, but maybe it was just too hard to show.  Who knows…either way, I’d like to see more of them.

Does the viewer know what Eddard has stumbled on yet…or the significance of it?  I pictured the little bull much larger.  I expected bowling balls for biceps…it’s how I picture every black smith in all the books I read, this mountain of a man bending and shaping iron…

This is probably the first episode where I wasn’t pissed the show differed from the book.  I’m trying to take them as two separate things and it’s pretty hard.  I’m trying to carve out more time to read so I can get through the rest of the books and be ready for #5…but I don’t think I’ll make it by July.

In episode 3 we finally see some conflict between dany and her brother…but it seems a little forced and pops up out of nowhere basically.  There wasn’t the foundation laid for it that we saw in the text.  Overall though, I’d say this episode was pretty good.  We saw her get closer to Drogo.  I focus a lot on dany because in thrones that was the most interesting dynamic to me (up to the end).  How this (what I pictured) fragile little girl began to embrace life with these savages.  I pictured these people much more ruthless and savage, but the limitations of tv, even hbo, would prevent the pictures I had formed in my head.

I’m diggin on the dwarf.  I think he was cast well and is playing out the character much how I imagined him to be.

Still no wolves…it’s becoming almost a problem at this point.  Where’s ghost?  Jon’s been on the wall for an episode now and we don’t see his wolf with him at all.

I also dig on the guy they’ve got playing the “old bear”…wasn’t he in brave heart?

****spoilers****

If you’ve read the book you know what happens at about the 3/4 point (maybe it was a little later, but not much).  Tell me they are not building that tension well.  If you didn’t know he was going to die, the look between eddard and kat when she left town…the way he setup defense training for his daughter and how he watched her from the doorway…it’s all very ominous.  HBO has done quite a good job building that up.  Maybe virgins to the story don’t see that, but it really seems to me that if you didn’t know it was coming…you should feel like -something- is coming.

It was clear by 1/2 way through episode 2 that I am not able to sit back and just enjoy this series for what it is.  I am constantly comparing it to the book, and in doing so I can’t understand how a virgin to the story could possibly be enjoying it.  If you have seen the first couple of episodes and you are enjoying it or if your a little bit lost and still remotely interested…go read the book.  The book adds so much more detail and richness to the overall story.  This show is giving you the cliff notes of the cliff notes version at best.  I’m hopeful that I can stop comparing the two and just enjoy the show for what it is.  As I said originally, the quality of acting is good, set design is good…etc.

The rest of this might contain some spoilers, read at your own risk.

I’ve been so terribly disappointed so far about how they have told the story of Dany.  In the book her story read (so far, I’m 1/4 into the 2nd book) as a woman who came from a position of being abused with no power, being tossed into a marriage with customs she thought barbaric and would never understand…to a woman whom claimed equal footing (in the marriage relationship) with her husband and over comes the abuse of her brother by standing up to him at certain points.  She gained that status with her husband via sex and her taking control of their encounters…embracing them and on some level seemed to find a certain level of happiness with her husband.  A huge step in the process of her embracing their culture was her first “dominate” sexual encounter with Drogo.

Did you see the scene when they helped her off the horse in episode 2?  How stiff and sore she was…how she could barley walk?  While the show doesn’t actually say anything about it, the book lets you know that her soreness is not solely caused by riding the horse.  Some might dismiss that as a little bathroom humor that didn’t need to be included, but it did show how she was being treated in the sack by Drogo, and that the experiences were not pleasant for her during or after.  At one point she asks another chic what she should do for him…that was covered in the show.  When she started in on Drogo though she took him outside, it was important to the story that she took him outside.  ”everything important in a man’s life should be done under the open sky”, is something the Dothraki believed, and it was key that she was the one to take him outside.  She understood this and was on the journey to embrace their culture as her own.

Also, there has been virtually no friction show between her and her brother.  Who she was before and how this guy treated her is going to have an affect on who she becomes in life and it’s being pretty much written out.  I assume at some point they will show some abuse, but without the ground work laid before hand it will look like an isolated incident, not the ongoing series of events that it was.  When the brother gets crowned it’s going to not be near as sweet as it was in the book because there is no foundation laid for it.

Where are the wolves?  They are pretty much side characters that you don’t really get attached to.  Why did I care that “lady” got killed?  Why would I care that bran’s wolf (can’t remember his name) came to his aid…what foundation has been laid for me to understand that the wolf would come to his aid…that it would be expected.  These wolves became very important to the children as both protectors and companions.  While we can watch on the screen that the children are upset Lady had to be killed, we don’t feel that attachment between them.  It’s not as powerful to the viewer because there is no connection formed in our eyes.  Also, at the end when the butcher’s boy was killed…I thought there was more discussion about “how” they killed him.  Maybe that’s later in the book, but I seem to remember a discussion that set a particularly brutal scene.

Also, when the prince and Sansa went on their walk and they encountered her sister and the boy…the conflict happens and Sansa says a couple of times “You’re ruining it!”…ruining what exactly?  If you read the book you know exactly what she is talking about and how it is important to her that things go a certain way…but watching you have no feeling of that.  To her character the idea of a lavish life fulfilling all her hopes of being a queen is very important and shapes how she acts.  It also heavily influences some of the decisions she makes later in an effort to reach that ideal life.  The show gives no sense of that though.

Maybe later in the show these “feelings” (for lack of a better word) will establish themselves in other ways.  Right now, all we have to go on is the point the show is, the corresponding point in the book and compare how the characters are established.  It is following standard HBO first run show themes though, throw a bit of sex in the first couple episodes, a bit of action…then follow through with character development.

This past Sunday HBO finally showed it’s much anticipated “original series” Game of thrones, which is based on the first book of the same name in the “Song of fire and ice” series by George R.R. Martin.  If you are a fan of the fantasy genre at all this book is a must read.  I have to admit that I had not read it until the beginning of this year.  I’d been putting it off, but when this series had an official start date I wanted to tear through the book before the series started.  It is a very well written book, probably the best fantasy book I’ve read to date.  It is very detailed without seeming like it drags on.  Night after night reading it I had a hard time putting it down.  The only part of the book I disliked was the ending, I won’t spoil it but I thought something different could have been done.  It was pretty light on fantasy to that point and I was pretty happy with that aspect of it.  After getting through the book, I was very excited to see the words come alive on the small screen.

After watching the first episode, there is good and bad IMO…and I will start with the good…

It’s an HBO series…those few words should set up your expectations for production quality, acting quality…etc.  From beginning to end this show had the high quality “everything” that you have come to expect from this network.  There were no corners cut, there was no cheesy special effects to suffer through.  It looked like it was shot in the time period intended.  Time and again HBO has done a fantastic job of putting out high quality series and this is no exception.  I can’t really say much more about it tbh…the quality of these shows is so expected at this point that as viewers we might not fully appreciate the effort and money that HBO puts forth.  If you want to see how much of a difference HBO makes in the quality of time pieces, watch an episode of Camelot.  I’ve seen one, and while it wasn’t horrible it was not HBO quality.  These shows are so good they are not even downloadable.  As a person that has dabbled in the dark arts /cough…I have come to the conclusion that HBO is well worth the subscription cost so they have my few bucks a month to help create these shows.  They do an amazing job…/end slirp

Now that what I didn’t like about this show…

Before I begin my rant, I want to say that I understand how these original series try to attract viewers.  Blood and Sex…It is a proven formula that has succeeded time and again.  In fact after the show was over, a buddy messaged me and made a comment about one of the sex scenes.  He was now interested in the series and it was due in no small part to that unexpected shock and awe factor.  Had that scene not been in the first episode, it might have no retained as many viewers as it should…but it’s what was missing that would have made that scene (and a couple others) so much more powerful.  If you haven’t read the book, or seen the show you probably don’t want to read below until you do…I’m not going to go much further in the story than the first episode did, but there is some spoiler info.

*********SPOILERS FOLLOW*************

The thing that made this book so fascinating to me was the depth of character development chapter after chapter.  It’s been my experience that a fantasy novel that touches 1k pages has pretty significant chunks that are just filler.  How many pages do you need to fill up with the characters eating, how much detail do I need about what their food looks like (yeah, I’m looking at you Jordan).  Game of thrones was so rich with character development that I didn’t scan through any pages..in fact I went back at times to re-read something to make sure I absorbed it all.  Martin chose to put detail in the correct spots (character) and leave other less important areas to the readers imagination (what their food tasted like…what their walk through the desert was like…).  Maybe that didn’t work for every reader, but it really drew me in to what he was trying to do with the book.  It’s very much a character driven story, it’s not people you know something about that are going through epic events.  It’s a story about who these people are and why they make the choices they make…it’s about how their core values and essence lead them down a specific path.

I don’t think it would have been possible in a season, much less an opening show, to get to that level of detail with the characters.  I understand why the show ended where it did and why it pushed so hard to get to the incest scene.  It’s those types of scenes that are going to keep viewers coming back.  It’s so important for HBO to grab a viewer with that scene, then go back and develop the characters after they have got the viewers attention.  It’s just out of order from what the book did.  The problem with doing that though is that it is so key to why these people are doing what they do.  There were 2 key areas where this background character information was missing and it really hurt the over all product…

The first spot I thought it was missing was across the sea with Viserys and Daenerys.  The way Viserys treated his sister was huge in understanding what kind of person he is.  The way she was treated also ultimately shaped the way she acted and how she comes to understand what kind of power she has, given her marriage.  The only inclination you got that viserys might have some sort of physical control over her was when he said, “you don’t want to wake the dragon”.  In the books he would smack her around quite a bit.  It wasn’t so much a “beating” per se, but I felt like it was a backhand any time he felt it necessary.  It seems to me I also remember a point where he went completely ape shit on her (I believe it was after the wedding).  There has been no build up to that.  You haven’t gotten the feel for his character like you should at this point.  You also don’t get the feel for how much he thinks he should be on the throne.  At one point when she said, “i don’t want to marry…” he whispered that he would give her to all 40k men and their horses if necessary…but without the buildup of his character, him smacking her around and understanding his desire to win his crown back…they are just the words of an guy that feels entitled to something he’s never really had.

On Daenery’s side, you understand that she doesn’t want to marry drogo but what we don’t see is how her opinion started to turn at the wedding.  We saw him give her the horse, but we didn’t see the elation she felt once she road it a little bit.  Speaking of gifts, there was a distinct lack of explanation for the gifts or what they mean.  In the book she had a “guide” so to speak…no maybe translator is a better classification for him.  She had a guy telling her about the ways of the Dothraki, what the gifts meant…that with a couple of them it was expected that she gifts the gift to her husband (weapons).  There was also some explanation about the horse, how it was the 2nd best in the herd (the best was drogo’s).  What she felt when she got on that horse and road a little was a huge key to her beginning to accept that she was now part of the tribe.  It didn’t come all at once, but that cracked the egg..and we didn’t see that.  Another huge part of the wedding story was the “no no no” scene.  When they are going to consummate their marriage, it was a much more sensual scene than what the show depicted.  she was obviously nervous, and really didn’t want to…but there was a point where drogo “won her over” so to speak.  He kept saying no as they were undressing, and she turned the no to a yes.  In the book, it wasn’t so much that she wanted to have sex with him, it was more that he was gentle with her…it showed that maybe he understood she wasn’t totally in to this.  In the show it really looked more forceable and IMO lost some of the connection that they made that evening.  Down the line in the story there is a point where they revisit sex between these two.  I hope HBO doesn’t shy away from that because it is so key in how their relationship goes after the marriage and how she finally becomes one of the tribe.  It’s through sex that she becomes empowered and shows that she has given herself over to this life and embraces it.  Beyond that, I think it’s entertaining from an adult perspective.

The wedding scene was also a bit of a disappointment.  It’s during that scene that it gets explained to the reader how these people breed.  If memory serves, all their breeding is done via 1/2 rape 1/2 bloody fighting for the right to breed with specific females.  While reading, I imagined the wedding as much more of a blood bath orgy type situation.  The book used an intermediary to explain the culture of these nomads to the “civilized” people, I really don’t know why the show decided not to take that route.  Later on as the tribe slaughters people, the idea of rape again becomes a key point in Daenery’s reach for power.

Another key area I didn’t think was explored well was Kat’s attachment to her family and her strength of character.  In the book she was much more tore up and argumentative about Eddard taking the position of king’s hand.  She didn’t like the idea of him going so far south, but more than that she hated the idea of him taking many of the children with him.  She understood the gravity of them being gone at that time and the fact that it would be -years- till she would see them again.  In the show, you get the impression that she doesn’t want Eddard to go…but there is nothing about the children really.  I might be way off on this, maybe she didn’t react like that until after the kid fell/was pushed, but I thought it was a theme all along.  Her strength of character and dedication is very critical to the over all story.  I really hope they are able to convey those feelings and emotions during the show.

As an interpretation of the book, I was disappointed in the show.  I’m not able to evaluate it as a stand alone entity as I will always compare it to the book.