Oh, by the way, I don't think I've said as much before, so: this is a spoiler blog. I'll feel free to mention details from all published books, and from spoiler chapters of The Winds of Winter.
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The first thing I should say is that on a technical level the show is a bit better made than I'd been giving it credit for. You can see where the money is going, the direction is sharp, and the performances, while they don't wow me as much as they do some viewers, are consistently solid: no one is bad, though a few are notably underwhelming. What holds the show back from fully enacting the upper-middlebrow template of HBO's prestige dramas (on which see Mike Hale's season three review) is the dialogue, which is horribly flat and banal. Characters are endlessly describing the plot to each other, saying exactly how they feel, and laying out themes. The show's idea of subtle is characters offering memories and legends up as obvious parables, but at least in those instances they leave out the fortune cookie wisdom; most of the time we aren't even that lucky.
The Littlefinger/Cersei scene about knowledge and power is an especially egregious case of "here is the theme, don't miss the theme" (and also demonstrates that, despite their evident love of a character they shoehorn into other storylines for no good reason, Benioff and Weiss have no grasp of what makes Littlefinger an interesting character). But further examples abound: Margaery telling Renly to man up, Margaery telling Loras to man up, Dagmer telling Theon to man up, Asha telling Theon to... well, you get the picture. And that's another problem: the show is a little over-eager to show its audience that you have to be CALCULATING and RUTHLESS to succeed in this society. That's an accurate reflection of the source material, but this is one of those cases where adaptation ought to have improved things, by removing the thematic repetition that comes with narrative bloat.* Unfortunately, Benioff and Weiss, unlikely the makers of actual quality HBO dramas, are not guided by a sense of dramatic quality, but by coolness of plot and character. Which can still make for an entertaining show.
The ending of "The North Remembers" is pretty strong, for instance, a well-directed, difficult to watch, thematically-relevant scene. I don't even mind that the show moved the decision to kill Robert's bastards from Cersei to Joffrey. It's a watering-down of her nastiness, as in season one, but unlike season one, season two doesn't offer other behavior that contradicts that watering-down, so it's at least coherent drama, and the notion of an evil queen uncertain and possibly unhappy in her victory is an intriguing one. It's also a reflection of Benioff and Weiss' preference for making characters ambiguous from the get-go, rather than following Martin's pattern of having them start off as types and show depth later, often when they become POV characters. There's an echo, however faint, of the decaying Cersei of A Feast for Crows in TV Cersei's second season. A big difference, of course, is that book Cersei is largely blind to Joffrey's faults; in fact, her grief for the son she never understood is a big cause of that psychological decay. It'll be interesting to see how season four (which, after the premiere's strong ratings, is a foregone conclusion) balances her grief with her knowledge of what he was.
The complementary mother/son relationship fares less well. The writers persist in taking strategic wisdom away from Catelyn and attributing it to Robb, undermining the books' deconstruction of the "boy king" trope and making her into a more conventional mother figure. It doesn't help that Michelle Fairley is a strong actress, while Richard Madden, who like Kit Harington appears to have been cast largely on the basis of prettiness (where does he get his hair gel out on the battlefield, anyway?), is competent but never compelling. To add further insult to injury, a big part of Catelyn's actual thematic purpose, to argue for peace and against needless war, is given to Talisa, a ridiculous character whose very existence flouts the class hierarchies that are part of the gritty realism the books and show are praised for.
Speaking of flouting class hierarchies, how about Arya and Tywin? Aren't they cute? And Jaime was dyslexic till Loving Papa Tywin fixed him! Reader, my heartstrings have been pulled! I don't even mind that Tywin shows no interest in a highborn northern girl who looks like a Stark, or that "will Littlefinger recognize Arya" is cheap melodrama that also undermines his character, or that all that time could have been used instead to show Arya's psychological coarsening as a result of the brutality of Harrenhal. Arya and Tywin are just so sweet. And sweetness is what Game of Thrones is all about.
Sweetness, and nudity. No one should have needed that Neil Marshall anecdote to recognize that nudity in Game of Thrones is mostly about straight male titillation. Like Osha sleeping with Theon. That was apparently part of her escape plan, though why it was necessary is an open question. Joffrey torturing Daisy and Ros has the fig leaf that it was to show us Joffrey being sadistic... as though we hadn't grasped that yet. (At least it was a rare example of Tyrion, a character whose shades of gray have been whitewashed, making a mistake.) The amount of sex on the show is often defended by pointing out that there's a lot of sex in the books, and of course there is. But proportionally speaking, the show includes much more of the sex from the books than it does anything else, and invents more. And as anyone who's thought about the effects of different media can tell you, prose and film don't work the same way. This is one of those cases where you could actually justify making changes, but of course they haven't.
Talking of changes-- oh, the effort I'm putting into these tortured transitions-- let's look at Daenerys. There was an interview with Emilia Clarke a while back in which she called season two "frustrating" for the character, which brought home to me that, despite the changes they made, Benioff and Weiss hadn't addressed the "problem" with Qarth: Dany's passivity. She reacts rather than acts. The show rather crudely turned this into theme and upped the superficial drama of the surrounding intrigue, but it still started the story slowly and didn't offer the sort of cool Daenerys butt-kicking action that the audience with which Benioff and Weiss seem obsessed would have preferred. And "Daenerys learns to stand up for herself and take what she wants" is, after the first season, an already-learned lesson, one that doesn't play to Emilia Clarke's strengths as an actress. Part of the reason "Where are my dragons?" is so grating is that Clarke turns the frustrated Daenerys into a posturing child. That may be the intention, but if so, it's a bad one. Still, the stuff with Xaro's empty vaults is a nice play on the "power as illusion" theme elsewhere in the book and season, so I'll give the show some credit for that.
I'm out of transitions, so let's just move on to Stannis and Renly. I think the introduction of Stannis works pretty well. You lose something not having all the Cressen backstory, of course, but the show doesn't do that kind of backstory, and I've made my peace with that. The show isn't really interested in the Stannis/Renly dynamic anyway, which I do think is a shame, simply because it captures the way an aristocratic society's political dramas can be driven by family dysfunction. In the books Stannis is the awkward middle child, caught between the gregarious Robert and the equally handsome and charming Renly, who despite his sexual orientation is very much like his brother. TV Renly, by contrast, is a bit of a feeb. This allows for Margaery and Loras to reiterate the themes by telling him to toughen up, but serves no actual purpose, and is remarkably dull to watch, the Tyrell siblings have nothing on the Lannisters when it comes to twisted family dynamics. I should note that TV Margaery is another example of Benioff and Weiss' lack of interest in non-assertive female characters. We can debate the extent to which the book version is politically alert, but she's certainly not shown to be this kind of hard-eyed pragmatist. The more the show turns its female characters into the kind of quote-unquote strong women you get in most epic fantasy, the less rich its portrait of feudal society is going to be. We only need so many Machiavellian schemers.
Speaking of which, what have they done with Stannis? The character in the books, one of the more fascinating non-POVs, is worth reading about precisely because of the ambiguous nature of his claim to be concerned with justice. The reader is left to wonder whether his self-image as the unjustly-ignored loyal and honorable guy doesn't cover up self-serving behavior, and to consider the dangers of devotion to black-and-white morality. None of this is in the show. Oh, a couple bits of dialogue reflecting it have been left in-- thoughtless copy-pasting again-- but the basic notion has been dropped, leaving a character who's cold and pedantic but never especially honorable, someone you're clearly not supposed to sympathize with. Melisandre, who in the books is clearly misguided but not monstrous, is reincarnated as a stock dark sorceress, exotic variety (and God, but that shadow creature is laughable: it's supposed to look like, you know, a shadow, not an ectoplasmic whatever). One has no sense why Davos, a decent guy, would support Stannis, or why anyone would, except as part of an endless series of self-interested calculations.
Well, that marks the end of the list of observations I typed up while watching the season, so I guess I'm done. No big conclusion here: I imagine I've made clear what I think doesn't work about the show. "So why are you watching?", you might ask. So I can complain about it, obviously. I enjoy thinking about what I do and don't admire in the show and its source material and why, and the overall gloss of the production means that watching isn't a painful experience. Plus my mom likes it, so it's something we can watch together. And if there's one more thing Game of Thrones is all about, it's family.
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