Thought on Last Week's Game of Thrones

Season 3 Episode 6, "The Climb"

Toast with jelly. Baileys nightcap. Sparkling Ice Mountain natural spring water, lemon essence. Delicious. (Getting my keyboard sticky.)

Okay, can we all agree that this last episode was the best one so far in season three? The Brienne and Jamie story line is really rolling. Last week we had the somewhat-strange bath scene between the two of them, roiling in platonic intimacy. And this week we get them at a dinner table, Jamie trying to cut his steak with one hand and Brienne wearing a dress (pink). They're facing across from the head (I think) of their captors, while they're fate is doled out. Brienne, ever stern, slams her fork into Jamie's steak, pinning it down for him to cut. Afterwards, the head captor says something at which she takes offense. Her hand on the table, she instinctively grips her steak knife. Jamie is busy smooth-talking and, without missing a beat, briefly places his hand on Brienne's. She calms down.

Bravo! Wonderful! Amen! It was a major pay-off, for me. I feel like I could watch those two actors together all day.

My complaint of the week is those darn reoccurring torture scenes. Nobody knows what's going on, and it's almost the same scene week to week. I just can't see, at this point, what they add. I don't think when we find out why this person is being tortured we'll be like - oh, you know it was a good thing I saw that fifth one. Finding out what was going on would have been so much less rewarding if I only saw torture scenes one through four.

Alright, til next time. And, remember, dismemberment is bad for the economy.

Edit 5/10/13:

I also meant to point out that this episode passed the Bechdel Test. The two women with Bran (who have names I can't remember. Ask Mitch; he knows them.) have a conversation with one another about skinning rabbits. All the more reason to like this episode.

Thoughts on Last Week's Game of Thrones

Season 3 Episode 5,  "Kissed by Fire"

Actually, I'm going to write about two of my thoughts on GOT up to this point. Two complaints, really. (I do like the show overall.)

First, the sides competing for the throne are unbalanced. Daenerys is too strong to make that interesting. She has dragons, a super-trained army, and I haven't seen her make one bad decision as leader so far. So unless she made one in season two (which I haven't seen), she's set no precedent for making mistakes. She's more of an icon than a real person. The only obstacle preventing her from taking the throne is her distance from it. The biggest thing going on is us waiting for her to get there, to finish her road trip. This makes Rob's concerns about winning the war seem small. He's only fighting to be interim monarch. I feel like the only thing to thwart Daenerys is either some act of god - flood, accidental spearing - or the White Walkers descending upon her. If it's the White Walkers scenario, then, in the meantime, we're still just waiting for the big players to get somewhere.

And I had something else...

Oh yeah, this last episode was dangerously close to being just a collection of scenes. Some of the scenes survive alright - Papa Lannister telling his adult children who they have to marry, Jamie and Brienne in the tub - but others don't. John Snow's and what's-her-name's sex scene in the cave felt supremely unimportant (even though he was breaking his vows) because their through line has been so spotty. We haven't seen them  together since maybe the first episode. We've lost the sense of their romantic tension, and so we don't feel the pay off. They're still an entertaining collection of scenes, but if they lose those through, lines it's going to be increasingly difficult to keep those scenes feeling important.

A Thought on the Last Episode of Game of Thrones

*Spoilers!*

Last week was Season 3 Episode 3, "Walk of Punishment," of Game of Thrones. You'll remember how, in the end, Jamie Lannister's hand was cut off. My immediate response to this was, "Ah! What a terrible loss of value." Never mind Jamie's questionable character, detaching anyone's hand from his or her body is a terrible loss of functionality and, therefore, value. If we believe that the amount of value in the world isn't fixed, that it can be added to and taken from, then it's a shame if we, any of us, do take away from that value.

In college, we had to do this robotics project. My and my partner's robot drew random things on a piece of paper by sensing the border of that paper and then backing up and turning around. It was really hard to make. The dexterity, responsiveness, overall functionality of a human hand is amazing. Trying to emulate it using technology would be extremely expensive, and even biological hands undergo the expense of training - hours at learning how to do things. Cut someone's hand off and it all evaporates - the overall value in the world deduced by that much. No! Don't cut off people's hands.