For “Game of Thrones†it was the calm both before and after the storm. In its Season 3 finale on Sunday night, HBO’s popular fantasy series gave its fans a breather after the graphic slaughter that punctuated the previous week’s episode and inspired countless reaction videos. Oh, there was violence (spoilers ahead): the pint-size warrior Arya Stark claimed her first kill, the Wildling raider Ygritte put some non-lethal arrows into her former boyfriend Jon Snow, and there was some real unpleasantness involving Theon Greyjoy’s anatomy. But by “Game of Thrones†standards it was a tea party.
At the same time, storm clouds were being gathered, adroitly if a bit obviously, presaging next season’s battles. Readers of the George R.R. Martin books on which the show is based already know what to expect, but the rest of us could take a pretty good guess: the threat of the White Walkers in the north will temporarily distract the warring kingdoms, and there will be a lot of blood falling on snow.
The profitable symbiosis between the television series and Mr. Martin’s sprawling sequence of novels appears to have mixed consequences for the show, and Sunday’s episode, “Mhysa†(“mother†in one of Mr. Martin’s made-up languages), was a case in point. On one hand, sturdy plotting and vivid characterizations are the show’s backbone and help to make it a must-see for a vocal segment of the contemporary TV audience that values the unraveling of story above all else.
Helen Sloan/HBO Maisie Williams as Arya Stark.There’s an awful lot of story to unravel, though, and “Mhysa,†as a season finale, was particularly loaded: in an hour we got glimpses, and not much more, of at least eight distinct plot threads in an equal number of locations. Presumably Mr. Martin has the space in his novels to give all his characters their due, but onscreen it gets frustrating as the people you’d like to spend more time with â€" Arya Stark, the noble dwarf Tyrion Lannister â€" use up their allotted minutes and the story jumps to dull Stannis Baratheon or the high camp of Daenerys Targaryen, the sexy emancipator.
In the course of the season some episodes are more focused, and that was certainly true of the penultimate episode, “The Rains of Castamere,†which devoted ample time to setting up and carrying out the decimation of the Stark clan at the hands of its supposed allies. The highly publicized shock that followed highlighted two ways in which the show crossed the normal TV boundaries. One was literal and not so well advised: the graphic throat slittings administered to several characters, which threw off the tone of the closing scene (and were not included in the finale’s “Previously On†reel).
What was more upsetting (to fans) and also bluntly refreshing was the way in which the show, for a second time, turned on characters it had laboriously built sympathy for, piling the deaths of Robb Stark and his mother, Catelyn, on top of the murder of his father, Eddard, in Season 1. Again, Mr. Martin can be thanked or blamed for this, and there was a sharp divide among viewers who knew the deaths were coming and those who didn’t. In retrospect it seems that there were plenty of pointed clues to the coming carnage in the pacing and framing of the episode, but that might be the Twitter effect of watching the episode the next day and knowing that something bad was going to happen.
“The Rains of Castamere†provided a possible answer to a question that had hung over the show since Season 2: why was Robb Stark so boring? The young king of the north was a central figure from the time his father died, but he was always the least interesting member of his family, well behind his mother, his sister Arya and his half-brother, Jon Snow. Perhaps the show’s writers, knowing his fate, didn’t want us to get to invested in him or just didn’t put as much effort into bringing him to life.
With its fealty to the Martin novels both mitigating and aggravating the problems of open-ended storytelling that all continuing series face, “Game of Thrones†can seem both vivid and diffuse, simultaneously exciting and excruciating: are we ever going to get there? And even with the generous budget accorded a showcase HBO production, it has to advance its narrative and express its ideas mainly through dialogue â€" endless conversations around tables and campfires, on horseback or in prison cells. Its real saving grace, of course, is that the cast includes actors who talk beautifully, including Charles Dance, Liam Cunningham, Stephen Dillane and the marvelous Peter Dinklage, who makes every scene with Tyrion Lannister worth watching. Presumably Mr. Martin and the “Game of Thrones†crew will know better than to kill the dwarf.
